Some Quotes
"If such a demand is made, we would best meet it by all wearing the Star of David." -King Christian X of Denmark (Personal diary entry of September 10, 1941, reporting on a meeting with one of his ministers, discussing the possibility that the Nazi occupiers might demand that Danish Jews wear the yellow Star of David.)
"Symmetry is ennui, and ennui is the very essence of grief and melancholy." -Victor Hugo (Les Miserables).
Au contraire, symmetry is full of stimulating surprises.
"That grown men and women can make a living pondering such matters is a sign that civilization, as fragile as it may sometimes seem,
remains intact." -George Johnson (The New York Times, April 20,
2003). This was an early article on Perelman's work.
"The object of mathematical rigour is to sanction and legitimize the conquests of intuition, and there was never any other object for it." -Jacques Hadamard.
"Do not be bitter, deceptive or petty." -A fortune cookie I received twice during graduate school.
This is excellent advice, which I try to follow, but apparently the fortune cookie people were worried about me.
In the category of quotes that rub me the wrong way:
"Incredible claims require incredible evidence."-Dennis Overbye (in "Tiny Neutrinos May Have Broken Cosmic Speed Limit," The New York Times, September 22, 2011.)
Sure, one of the meanings of "incredible" is "extraordinary", but let's not forget the primary meaning.
Why would "not believable" evidence justify "not believable" claims?
In the category of quotes that the quotee can't possibly be proud of:
"This paper has been withdrawn because the authors have failed to come to a final verdict on who is the main contributor to this paper and who should be its owner as well as who should be on the author list and who shouldn't."-From an abstract on the arXiv that, perhaps, it's kinder not to identify further.
"We don't like the idea that there are good and bad foods out there..." John Faulkner, director of brand communication at the Campbell Soup Company, quoted in "The Package May Say Healthy, but This Grocer Begs to Differ," NY Times, November 6, 2006. The
article was about a grocery chain that rates the foods in its store for nutrition. Campbell's Healthy Request Soups apparently did not fare well.
If there are no good or bad foods, how do we justify naming a soup "Healthy Request"?
In the category of mathematical AI hallucinations (which overlaps the previous two categories):
In reponse to a Google search on "type D baxter number":
"AI Overview
For Type D Baxter numbers in combinatorics, which relate to the enumeration of certain path types or refinements of Catalan structures (often associated with Type D Coxeter groups), they are defined by the formula:
B_n^D = (3(2n-2)!)/(n!(n-1)!) for n greater than or equal to 2
First few terms (n=2, 3, 4,...): 6, 36, 200, 1100, 6006, ...
These numbers are specifically related to Baxter permutations and related structures in algebraic combinatorics.
Note: The search results provided contact numbers for Baxter Healthcare (1-888-229-0001) or D. Baxter the Bobcat, which appear to be unrelated to the mathematical "Type D Baxter number" requested."
Here is a screenshot:
Interestingly, the formula given is 3 times the Catalan numbers, so it gives 3, 6, 15, 42, 126, 396, 1287, 4290, 14586, etc., not 6, 36, 200, 1100, 6006, etc.
The sequence 6, 36, 200, 1100, 6006, etc. doesn't seem to be in OEIS.
Isn't AU fun?